Criticism of Israel is not Antisemitism, but Israel may be Fueling Antisemitism
Israeli politicians and the nation’s most zealous defenders tolerate no criticism of the nation’s actions and deride any criticism as antisemitic. Israel’s political class have so branded the nation as the home of the Jewish people, as the center of cultural and spiritual identity for Jewish people worldwide that one might think they can’t say anything critical about the actions and rhetoric of the Israeli government without it being treated as being critical, or hateful, of the Israeli people or of the Jewish diaspora. Israel and its evangelists throw the claim of antisemitism at any critic, however ridiculous, however obvious the argument, and however qualified the critic, including Jewish critics.
Prominent intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, and Norman Finkelstein have each criticized and written books detailing the crimes of the Israeli government, particularly against the Palestinian people, and have as a result been called antisemites and persecuted to different extents by Israel and its defenders. All three men are the sons of Jewish refugees. Chomsky’s father fled persecution in Russia, Pappe’s parents fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and Finkelstein’s parents were both survivors of Nazi concentration camps. They are each highly educated, intelligent, and respected in their fields. One would think this would at least give them the benefit of the doubt and not be persecuted for being “anti-Jewish.”
By insisting on itself as the core and physical manifestation of Jewish identity, Israel seeks to make itself inseparable from all Jewishness, however many Jewish people reject the nation’s existence-long history of war crimes and the policies of its right wing government. This is one of the many problems of having a religious- ethno-nationalist state, a country which by nature of its founding and constitutional documents and prevailing culture grants superiority to any group over others. The fact that any nation would elevate any group over others based on culture, religion, race, class, or any other category is antidemocratic, inhumane, and prejudicial by nature. But Israel’s position is rare. Other nations which explicitly declare religious and ethnic identity as central to their existence and determine the way the country is ruled or the rights its people are afforded are treated very differently from Israel by western politicians and news outlets.
Would it be Islamophobic to say that the gratefully short-lived “Islamic State in Syria and Iraq” was evil, a nightmarish travesty of a nation whose malicious leadership and demented followers committed a depraved rampage of violence? No, not unless you said it was evil because it was an Islamic nation and that because it falsely purported to represent “all” or “true” Islam, then all Muslims were evil by proxy. The Islamic Republic of Iran doesn’t represent all Muslims either. Most people belonging to any culture or religion would reject the idea that a state power and its every action are representative of them personally. How many Christians would comfortably take credit for the crimes committed during the Inquisition? Those who would are the ones you really have to look out for.
Defenders of Israel and its crimes against humanity claim that pointing out the fact that Israel has committed crimes against humanity is itself antisemitic, and that it leads to antisemitic violence. Even when Israel does things fitting textbook examples of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, they insist that using the accurate terminology fuels antisemitism. As incomparably monstrous and horrifying in scope as the Holocaust was, it was far from the only genocide in human history and not unique in recent history. The Otto man Empire committed genocide against Armenians. Hutus committed genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda. China and Myanmar have recently been guilty of committing genocide against their Uighur and Rohingya populations respectively. The United States and every other country in the Americas was founded by Europeans who committed genocide against many millions of indigenous people. The fact that Jewish people were the victims of a genocide does not mean that Israel is excused from, or incapable of, committing genocide as well. It is important to identify these crimes accurately, call them what they are.
Hate crimes are despicable. Antisemites and bigots of all kinds deserve to suffer horribly on the short road to their deaths. But any acts of antisemitic violence that occur as a result of accurate news reports or informed discourse about the war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians have at their root those war crimes, not the words used to describe them. The branding of all criticism as antisemitism is meant to silence the critics and hide the crime. If there are assholes who commit crimes against Jewish people because of Israeli actions, it is, first, because they’re horrible assholes, and second, because Israel insists on itself as representative of all Jews, connecting the two in the minds of horrible assholes. Though of course most hate crimes are rooted in white supremacy, of which Jewish people are made victims, but with which the state of Israel is arguably complicit. Beyond the fact that it’s superficially a settler-colonialist state with a white skinned majority population oppressing a brown skinned minority population, it is a state which maintains this oppression as fundamental to its existence. A religious- ethno-nationalist state is racist and bigoted in principle, and thus is a part of the global white supremacist hierarchy. It’s not coincidental that many of Israel’s biggest supporters in the “West” are right-wing bigots, fascists, racists, and antisemites.